"I will answer beforehand. Lord ---- would be enchanted to secure to the public service a man so accomplished as yourself, and the son of a peer like Lord Lansmere." Harley L'Estrange sprang to his feet, and flung his cigar in the face of a stately policeman who was looking up at the balcony. "Infamous and bloodless official!" cried Harley L'Estrange; "so you could provide for a pimple-nosed lackey--for a wine-merchant who has been poisoning the king's subjects with white-lead or sloe-juice--for an idle sybarite, who would complain of a crumpled rose-leaf; and nothing, in all the vast patronage of England, for a broken-down soldier, whose dauntless breast was her rampart!" "Harley," said the Member of Parliament, with his calm sensible smile, "this would be a very good clap-trap at a small theatre; but there is nothing in which Parliament demands such rigid economy as the military branch of the public service; and no man for whom it is so hard to effect what we must plainly call a job as a subaltern officer, who has done nothing more than his duty--and all military men do that. Still, as you take it so earnestly, I will use what interest I can at the War Office, and get him, perhaps, the mastership of a barrack." "You had better; for, if you do not, I swear I will turn Radical, and come down to your own city to oppose you, with Hunt and Cobbett to canvass for me." "I should be very glad to see you come into Parliament, even as a Radical, and at my expense," said Audley, with great kindness. "But the air is growing cold, and you are not accustomed to our climate. Nay, if you are too poetic for catarrhs and rheums, I'm not--come in." CHAPTER VI.